Category Archives: wellbeing

Cold season looms on the horizon as fall approaches and if you’re like me, you don’t like sniffling, sneezing and feeling less than your best.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin have been studying how to prevent colds and they came up with a novel, and highly effective, solution.

The scientists recruited a group of 149 people and divided them into three groups. The first group received 8 weeks of meditation training. The second group received 8 weeks of training in moderately intense exercise. The third group received no training and functioned as a control group.

At the end of the study period, the meditation group experienced the fewest days missed from work and had the least severe symptoms. The exercise group also showed marked improvement over the control group. The third group spent about 30% more of their time under the weather.

Over the years, I have tried many types of meditation and found significant benefits from all of them. Mental clarity, a sense of control and increased ability to focus in the midst of very stressful situations were some of the biggest boosts. And I got fewer colds too.

This fall I’m going to meditate as I walk around the neighborhood looking at the changing leaves and I’m going spend less time indoors on the couch curled up with a box of tissues!

Imagine you could go to a department store and buy happiness. How would a package of happiness look? How much would it cost? More importantly, how long would it last? In our affluent culture, much emphasis is placed on earning more, spending more, getting more. But what price do we pay to get more? How long are we satisfied before we need to go to the next level?

Money and happiness are related, just not as much as we think. It seems that the most important thing we can do is be born in an affluent democracy rather than an impoverished dictatorship. People are much less likely to be happy when they are scrambling to meet their basic survival needs. Once people get over the poverty line, extra money doesn’t contribute that much to happiness. In fact happiness researchers have found that in spite of rising standards of living, the percentage of people in the United States who described themselves as “very happy” has dropped from 34% in the early 1970s to only 30% in the late 1990s.

Affluence can have a dark side. In a recent study, researchers found that people with higher incomes didn’t report being happier during the course of a day but did report higher levels of anger and anxiety. They also spent more time commuting, working and maintaining their homes and other material possessions. These activities tend to lower one’s level of happiness.

Our children aren’t immune to money’s dark side. In “The Price of Privilege” psychologist Madeline Levine says there is an epidemic of emptiness and despair in affluent teens. Between 30 and 40 percent of affluent teenagers suffer from emotional illnesses such as depression and anxiety, three times the rate found in the general population of teenagers. They also have higher rates of drug abuse and are more likely to self mutilate. Levine says this is due in part to their greater connection to material possessions than to people.

We can’t just blame parents for this. Our culture emphasizes individualism and competition, fostering an “I win, you lose” mindset. Competition destroys intimacy and isolates people from one another. To build meaningful social relationships and create a sense of community, we need to stress the virtues of cooperation and reciprocity. Before we became prisoners of our affluence, neighbors helped each other to build barns, sew quilts and harvest food. While we can’t go back to this, there are financial choices we can make to increase our happiness.

We can shift our priorities to getting time instead of money. Working less overtime, taking all of our vacation time, even taking an occasional day off without pay will make us healthier as well as happier. Cutting down our commute can help. Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University says that commuting is so unpredictable that humans cannot adapt to it. At least keep the commute under 30 minutes. It takes about a minute of recovery time to de-stress from every minute of commute time. If your commute is too long and you have to dive into household chores and family responsibilities the minute you get home, you are unlikely to recover and will be living with chronic stress.

When we free up time and reduce our stress, we have more energy to spend our leisure time on the things that contribute the most to our wellbeing. Instead of getting home too tired to do anything other than watch TV, we can take a walk with a friend or take a class. When we are not spending our weekends doing household chores or maintenance on our stuff, we can take mini-vacations. Taking vacations reduces our risk of heart disease and with health care costs rising, who can afford to get sick?

I love the Spanish tradition of tapas. In Spain, dinner is served late in the evening so people snack on delectable bites of food between lunch and dinner. They may be hot or cold and range from simple to sophisticated. They evolved with input from many cultures and are crafted with a variety of highly flavored ingredients including tomatoes, chilis, olives, garlic, spices, meats and seafood.

Tapas ingredients

Tapas are appetizers, designed to fill the gap between lunch and dinner. Individually they don’t look like much but when you put several of them on a plate you have a substantial meal. Alone they may be insignificant; together they are scrumptious.

Ed Diener, one of the founders of the emerging field of positive psychology, said that happiness is made up of many small happy moments a day rather than a small number of transcendent moments.

Too often we don’t take the time to savor the small moments of joy in a day. We are too busy thinking about the imaginary future and the great big juicy experiences we think will make us happy. When these experiences come and all-too-quickly go, we are left with a feeling of dissatisfaction and the question “Is that all there is?”

Waking up beside someone you love, petting a soft purring cat, burying your hands in the rich soil of your garden, drinking a cup of hot tea, having dinner with friends: none of these activities can be described as earth-shattering yet each is a contributor to a happy life.

Often we feel too pressured and rushed to stop and reflect for even a brief instant on what really contributes to our happiness. Our headlong and heedless rush to pursue “the good life” has blinded us to the things that actually constitute a good life.

Every day, no matter how over scheduled, has space for small bites of happiness. It is important to create room for these moments and to pay attention to them when they happen. Savoring little positive experiences is like enjoying tapas. One appetizer is only a snack but put several together you have a satisfying meal.

Bites of happiness have more value than they appear when viewed in isolation and should be respected for what they can do. Initially it may take a conscious effort to create these moments if you are not used to pausing and savoring small things. In a short period of time, the shift in your awareness will become an entrenched habit and happy moments will become part of your day.

What are your opportunities for happiness today? What can you do tomorrow? This weekend? It doesn’t have to be big or take a lot of time or energy. It just has to be done.

Imagine you have a car and you couldn’t replace any of the parts if they break. You need to keep it going as long as possible on the original parts and in as good a condition as possible. (Like in Cuba, where, due to the embargo and lack of ability to import new cars, you see a lot of cars from the 1950’s still on the streets.)

If this car was designed to take premium gasoline only, would you give it regular gas? Would you skip changing the oil or would you change it regularly?

I’ll bet you would take the car in for routine maintenance on a regular schedule. I’ll bet you would make sure this car had what it needed to run a long, long time. I’ll bet you would check the fluid and check the tires and check the hoses.

Most people would not hesitate to do this for their cars, to get their cars what they need, to take them in for checkups and maintenance. Yet they hesitate to do this for themselves. Many people skip having regular physicals, hoping that nothing is wrong and avoiding having the screening tests that can alert them to a problem when it’s early enough to do something about it.

What happens when your car’s radiator gets low on fluid? The engine overheats and steam comes from the radiator. This lets you know that something is wrong, that you need to stop, let the engine cool down and then add more radiator fluid. What happens when your car has an oil leak and all of the oil drains out of the car? A red indicator light comes on and let you know there is a problem with your oil levels. If you continue to drive the car without taking care of this problem, the engine can seize.

What happens when your body becomes dehydrated? Most of the time, there aren’t any symptoms. Certainly there’s no indicator light telling us we need to drink more water. And as we age, our thirst mechanisms aren’t as good at letting us know we need to drink more water as they were when we were young.

When we are dehydrated, because there’s less fluid in our blood vessels, our blood becomes thicker, more concentrated and more prone to clotting. This can lead to an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. Dehydration also makes us feel tired. Often we perceive this lack of energy as a signal that we need to eat rather than a signal to drink more water. Our misinterpretation of this signal causes many of us to overeat, to take in calories we don’t need.

Many people don’t give their bodies the proper fuel to keep them running or they don’t drink enough fluids or don’t get enough exercise.

Too bad our bodies don’t have indicator lights like our cars. If we did, we would be alerted to the fact that something is wrong and we need to get a checkup. The problem is many of our illnesses develop slowly over time and without symptoms until our bodies have sustained irreparable damage. This is why physicians have screening tests.

You may not feel colon cancer until the tumor is large enough to obstruct your bowel and cause a great deal of pain and an emergency hospital admission. You may not feel diabetes until one day you wake up and your numb foot has turned black from gangrene. You may not feel hypertension until you collapse in your bedroom and wake up without the ability to move the left side of your body.

I saw this stuff every day on the job. I don’t know how many diabetics’ amputated gangrenous feet and legs I examined. I can’t tell you how many times I was the first person to know someone was going to die of a horrible disease because I lost count a long time ago. To me these things are not abstractions but are very real.

When I hear people trivializing this I get irritated. And when I see them feeding their children sugary sodas and processed food, I get angry. If an adult wants to consistently make poor health decisions, that’s one thing. They’re adults and they have the right. Condemning a child to a disastrous future is something else entirely.

The way things are going, an estimated 1 in 3 children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. This is a completely preventable disease. Physicians are having to screen 8 year-olds for high cholesterol. High cholesterol in children is also preventable. A healthy diet free of heavily processed foods and refined sugars and rich in fruits and vegetables will prevent many of the appalling diseases that plague so many.

Our bodies are tremendously resilient and have great repair capability, at least for a while. But if we persist with bad food and unhealthy beverages and too much stress and not enough exercise or sleep, eventually they will break down. And by the time there is an indicator, it may be too late.

1952 Dodge M37 military truck with the original flathead 6 engine. Still going strong after 60 years.

I had a conversation recently with a relative who admits he has a weight problem.He listed his favorite foods (all processed and fast food) and said it’s a quality of life issue. He associated eating a healthy diet with deprivation and said he would rather trade several years of his life for his favorite foods.

Like many people who eat a Standard American Diet (SAD), he has not made a connection between fresh, real food and great tasting food. There’s no such thing as deprivation on a healthy diet. A poor diet is deprivation. It deprives your cellular structure of nutrients. It deprives your body of what it needs for vitality, energy and longevity.

People don’t think of their final years when making food choices but maybe they should. They don’t have a picture of themselves bedridden or in a wheelchair due to amputations or in a dialysis clinic hooked up to the machine that is keeping them alive.

People don’t think of the time they won’t spend with their grandchildren or enjoying nature or pursuing hobbies. They think of the Twinkie or the pizza or the cupcake and the momentary flash of enjoyment they get. For many, the sugar rush trumps all. Like an addict’s response to drugs, they are in an endless cycle of cravings followed by momentary satisfaction followed all-to-quickly by more cravings.

Many people want instant gratification and damn the long-term consequences. Living with heart disease, cancer, arthritis and other degenerative diseases lowers your quality of life. When you get a taste for real food, you get both instant gratification and long-term health. What could be better than that? Now that’s quality of life.

Change is hard. It’s inevitable, unceasing and unavoidable. It’s constant yet we struggle with it. Change means growth and growth is often painful.

Change can be thrust upon us from the outside. Sometimes change comes rolling in with the tidal force of a tsunami, destroying everything in its path and pulling the wreckage out to sea. We are forced to retrench and rebuild from the destruction. Things like a divorce, a job loss or a catastrophic illness as well as positive things like winning the lottery or giving birth change our lives as we know them. Any sudden change, whether good or bad, knocks us off balance. It may be difficult to regain our equilibrium. It takes time, energy and effort to come to grips with what is different.

When change comes from outside of us, often there are resources we can draw on to help us through it. Support groups for people with illness or going through a divorce, for example, can ease some of the burdens and make change easier. Job ministries at local churches can help the job seeker regroup.

Change can also come from within, “creeping in on little cat feet.” This kind of insidious change sneakily alters the familiar terrain of our lives over time. It germinates inside us, sending out roots that slowly crack our foundation. The roots go deep into our subconscious, taking form as small dissatisfactions with our current lives. As these roots get larger, we begin to realize we have to initiate change. We’re not happy and we have no possibility of happiness while living a life which may be quite fine for someone else but which no longer is a good fit for us.

This self-initiated change is often more difficult than change which is forced upon us from external events. We are the initiators. All of the energy comes from us. Outsiders who don’t have our perspective on the wrongness of our circumstances have no understanding, no sympathy and provide no support. In fact, many times the people whose support we most need are the most opposed to our evolution. They are the least likely to be there for us because we are forcing change on them.

When we change, others around us must also change. We are not the same person with the same needs and the same way of being. Therefore the same ways of interacting don’t work. There is a ripple effect of this change which can alter our lives as deeply and profoundly as a change which is forced upon us.

Whether change is a rapid overwhelming force or a small nibble at the periphery of our lives, our role is to adjust to what has become new and different.

When making changes, however large or small, it’s important to have a support group, a community even if it’s just one person. Sometimes our friends can help but unfortunately sometimes our friends and family can hinder our attempts to change. In these circumstances, it’s nice to have a coach, someone in your corner who is looking out for your welfare.

What changes are you dealing with? Who can you call on to help you with these changes?

spring hydrangea bloom

Thought for today

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.